CHINA: Warlords Demoted

Though many small-fry deviationists have
crumpled before Mao Tse-tung's firing squads. Red China's masters in 30
years of party organization have yet to undergo a true Russian-style
purge. Yet there were mighty stresses and strains in seizing and
subduing a vast and unwieldy country of 600 million hungry people.
Peking's first solution of the problem was to divide China into six
administrative regions, all but one of them in the charge of a
first-line army general. The six leaders were, in effect, local
warlords bound together by Communist discipline.